If you are a WordPress theme developer, chances are high that you’re working with the Customizer to provide certain design options to your themes’ users – whether it is for colors, fonts, spacing or else. Providing customization opportunities is crucial for a theme’s adoption as you will never be able to please every user with your theme’s out-of-the-box design. As widely known, most WordPress users look for feature-rich solutions when assembling their site. They may find your theme’s base design very appealing, but if they cannot modify it to e.g. use their brand colors, they’ll quickly move on to something else. Long story short: Allowing users to customize your theme is crucial for adoption.

Now there’s an issue with that though: Most of these design options affect the site’s CSS, and CSS is a largely static resource. Therefore the typical approach to integrate these Customizer controls with the theme’s actual appearance is to copy the pieces of CSS that would be affected by the respective options from the stylesheet into a PHP file, and from there generate that stylesheet on the fly. This results in three major problems:

You are most likely sending a whole bunch of duplicate CSS down the line, negatively affecting performance of the site.

Because you are duplicating CSS, the approach is quite error-prone. For example when modifying CSS later, you need to remember to also make the exact same change in the Customizer CSS, if it applies there too.

This also affects the WYSIWYG experience in the editor, as you also need to manually maintain the CSS for the editor (Gutenberg / classic) in the same way.

There is a solution to all of these problems though, and its name is “CSS Custom Properties”. In this post we will look at how to use this CSS feature to improve UX for both website visitors and content creators, all at once.

A few weeks ago, it was announced that Google Chrome started supporting the new loading attribute, which allows websites to have their images and iframes lazy-loaded without any custom JavaScript. Support for the feature will most likely be extended to further browsers soon, but you can already use it today without any negative impact for browsers where it isn’t supported yet.

If you have a WordPress site, our team at Google has just released a new plugin “Native Lazyload” which you can install, activate, and your site will support native lazy-loading instantly.

This is essentially a written version of the talk of the same name that I gave at WordCamp Europe 2019 (see the related slide deck).

As I’m sure we can all confirm, WordPress provides a strong toolset for creating awesome content. Particularly with the availability of the Gutenberg editor, publishers can now implement more interesting layouts and take their content quality to the next level. However, while the content itself is certainly the most important part of a website, there are a few other supporting pillars to ensure delightful content experiences for users consuming that content. Websites should be:

Unfortunately, satisfying each of these four requirements is anything but trivial. You might already know that just installing a performance or a security plugin is not actually going to magically solve these respective points.

Technologies and best practices on the web are constantly evolving: Regularly new APIs are introduced, new standards being established, former best practices being overruled. Add in all the popular frameworks that have come and gone over the years, and it becomes even more evident: Even the most senior rockstar full-stack developer cannot keep up with this technology complexity on their own.

In addition, even in the scope of a single website or application, maintaining a good overview of the different pieces can present a huge cognitive challenge. HTML, CSS, JavaScript, code for different areas shed across everywhere, with possible incompatibilities in functionality as well as in appearance with all thiese pieces being used in combination. This is what we can refer to as content complexity.

Fortunately, there are ways to reduce and work around both of these complexities. In this post we will look at a component-based approach and a relatively new technology called “Custom Elements” and how they address the aforementioned problems.

The web has been constantly evolving. Over the years we have seen milestones such as the introduction of responsive images, AJAX requests, or location access for some examples. More recently features like Add to Home Screen, which allows you to make websites easily accessible on your phone or desktop, or Web Payments, a standardized way of processing payments on the web, have been made available. Even lazy-loading media is likely to come natively to the web soon.

While all these features are very powerful, they also pose the challenge of using them responsibly, and making sure to not abuse them, which could harm user experience. For example, asking the user to grant location access to a website without making it obvious what this would be used for and without providing a clear user benefit, the resulting pop-up can be more of a distraction than the purpose would justify it. I’m sure you have seen websites where you had to go through way too many pop-ups and consent requests before getting to the content you actually intended to see.

Keeping track of all these web features can be a tedious task, especially in the context of a CMS like WordPress, where much of the codebase (probably even most of it) comes from third parties on many sites. Even if you yourself are a responsible citizen of the web, third-party plugins and themes might have flaws or might be misusing features in ways you aren’t aware of.

This is where two new proposed web standards, Feature Policy and Reporting API, come into play.

I’ve been developing for WordPress over a few years now. I love the simplicity of the system (compared to other content management systems) and that it is nevertheless as powerful as all of its competitors. However, one thing always annoyed me, and I bet everyone else too: Setting it up is just a pain. Not because it is in any way hard, but because it costs some time. It’s only about 10 minutes maximum, but I didn’t want to invest this time doing the exact same thing for any web site I set up. Yeah, it’s just 10 minutes – but you probably heard that developers are lazy. You probably set up WordPress sites as well, so I don’t need to tell you this. But there is another way which I’ll illustrate in this tutorial. I will explain how you can set up your WordPress installation by executing just one single script in Terminal (you should have a basic understanding of how to use it before reading this article). Furthermore you will learn how to include a WordPress starter theme that has all the important tools built-in. But now let’s get started in kickstarting your projects!

Schema.org provides you a good way to optimize your website for search engines. SEO surely means much more than that, but the usage of Schema.org will improve your visibility to Google & Co. a lot. Have you ever, for example, checked out movie search results at a website like IMDB.com or Wikipedia.org? They will mostly show you additional information for that particular movie, such as a trailer link, a link to release dates, maybe user ratings for this movie (check out the tiny yellow stars there!) and sometimes information about the actors, the director and much more, depending on your search query – and the website’s markup with Schema.org. So Google is not that intelligent that they know what the website is about – you gotta ensure this yourself by adding Schema.org microdata. While it does not directly improve your website’s rankings, the search results for your page will certainly look more appealing to users since additional information will be included.Continue reading “How To Improve WordPress SEO with Schema.org”

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